In a remarkably candid interview, Sir Stuart Rose talks about being unemployed at 61 and what it’s really like to run Marks & Spencer

Surely he won’t miss the letters. In the early days of his tenure at limp old
Marks & Spencer (before its Viagra injection from Twiggy turned it into your
M&S), he was getting 4,000 a week from disgruntled customers, mostly of
the green-ink variety. “I can still see the wagging fingers now,” he says,
his lugubrious voice swelling with something that sounds suspiciously close
to battle-adrenalin. “Before they even opened their mouths, it would be,
‘Oh, you’re that Stuart Rose, aren’t you?’ ”

But he is no longer that Stuart Rose. Or at least not the one who was CEO of